Texas Inmates Scraped Together Over $50,000 in Hurricane Harvey Donations

After natural disasters, people often find creative, unexpected ways to help each other. When Hurricane Katrina savaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, prisoners in Texas wanted to contribute to relief efforts. Eventually, their wardens designed a system that would let them donate directly to the Red Cross from their commissary funds, and the inmates wound up giving more than $44,000.

Now, in the aftermath of disastrous flooding from Hurricane Harvey, they've stepped up again. More than 6,000 inmates together donated $53,863, and as the New York Times points out, that's a staggering amount when you consider that most inmates only have around $5 in their commissary funds.

At a glance, this is a heartening story about people supporting each other. And while it's a great act of compassion, it's hard not to hear this and think about how nightmarishly prisoners are treated in the U.S.
The people running prisons are looking for ways to wring as much money as possible out of inmates while spending as little as they can to keep them alive. In fact, The Nation reports that authorities in Texas decided against evacuating multiple prisons ahead of Harvey, and as a result hundreds of inmates have described horrifying flooding to the National Lawyers Guild:

The accounts collected by the NLG report power outages and insufficient access to food, water, and medicine. Inmates described cells flooded knee-high with water contaminated by urine and feces, as well as the inability to flush toilets, take showers, or change clothes for two weeks.

Kudos to the Texan inmates for pulling together as much as they did to help people whose homes and lives were destroyed. But they shouldn't have to give up what few dollars they have for the rest of the country to remember that they're also people.